Revision as of 11:56, 19 May 2014

FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon APAC will be held in Beijing, China on May 23–25, 2014. It will be the first premier event in Fedora.next phase, spreading innovative ideas and helping make Fedora better than ever. It offers an opportunity for all who contribute to or use Fedora to meet, learn, plan, and hack. This event is free and is open to everyone. This year it will be held together with GNOME.Asia Summit, an annual conference for GNOME users and developers in Asia. We believe the cooperation will bring a more exciting gather up of free and open source communities.

Special Notes for Hackfest/Workshop

"The robotics SIG has been working on packaging up the ROS robotics platform for Fedora. I'd like to sit down with any interested parties and package up as much of ROS groovy as possible as an SCL to a COPR repository. I'll use the opportunity to teach people how SCLs work and even some packaging if there are new people looking to start with Fedora packaging."

A working Fedora 19/20 installation. Some knowledge of RPM packaging would be beneficial.

Workshop

A GPG key signing party

"The GPG key signing party helps to extend the web of trust to a great degree. I'll briefly introduce the web of trust, and then we'll go about signing each others GPG keys! We'll also discuss good practices about backing up one's keys etc. and how one can use GPG to sign other things, like e-mail, git commits or encrypt files."

A brief introduction of Fedora i18n and L10n process. We'll talk about how to do i18n on Fedora and how to do L10n on Transifex platform. And some basic procedure on i18n & L10n test. Also we'll share some experience on translation.

Nearby Facilities

Hotels

Beihang Training Center provides accommodation service and it is quite near (distance of 400 meters) to the conference venue, New Main Building of Beihang. We have reserved 7 standard rooms in the Training Center. The hotel bill will be paid at checkout time. The organizers will book the hotel and pay for the amount during conference days (May 23 to 25, three nights). If you need to stay for more nights, please provide your check in and check out date, and the organizers will try to book the whole stay for you. You need to pay for extra stay yourself. Feel free to ask for help from organizers on fudcon-planning list, or by private mail, or face to face at the conference.

Cheaper hotel options are available, but mostly personnel is not proficient enough at English. If needed, special arrangement or last-minute can be discussed. On the following hotel map more options can be found near the venue.

Transportation to Beijing

Price indication for flight tickets. For international and domestic flights you can fly directly to Beijing (PEK; Beijing Capital Airport). For domestic flights it is also possible to arrive Tianjin (Tianjin Binhai airport) and take the high speed train to Beijing (this takes about 30-40mins).

Costs from China

For Chinese citizens it is also possible to come by train. Each train station in Beijing offers good connection with the subway. As mentioned earlier, it is possible to even fly to Tianjin and take the high speed connection to Beijing. This option is in fact also available for Shanghai (high speed train takes about 5:30 hours).

We'd like speakers to apply Visa type L (travel visa), since its application is normally easier, and the requirements are loose. For Visa type L, the requirement is EITHER flight ticket and hotel reservation OR an invitation letter.

If things go smoothly, two weeks can be enough, but there will not room for error. It's better to start the application two months before the travel time.

Visa for US Citizens is USD 140.

Invitation Letter

We can provide invitation letter to ease the visa application procedure. If you need an invitation letter, please fill in the form on google docs or email your request to the organizers (to Alick Zhao, cc Christopher Meng, Zamir Sun) with the following information:

Full name (as on passport)

Gender

Birthdate (as on passport)

Country

Passport number

About Beijing & BUAA

The city

Beijing (北京) is the capital and cultural heart of China. It houses many universities and high profile IT companies of which Red Hat China is one.

Beijing is the second largest city in the People's Republic of China and has a very distinct and easy layout. The city is based around a ring structure which starts with the Forbidden City (or Palace Museum) being the center.

The city allows you to easily move around using public transport, of which the Subway is probably the best way. All proposed events sites,hotels, restaurants and shopping places are easily accessible by subway. You can see numerous lines at here

Beijing provides full possibilities for foreign visitors to have rich experience in the following ways:

Cuisine: Restaurants of different tastes of food from all over the world are available in Beijing. From the most well known restaurants of Quan Ju De Roasting Duck, Dong Lai Shun Instant-boiled Mutton, to popular gourmet street. It's easy for you to find the right one suitable for your budget from 4 dollars/person to 60 dollars/person or above. If you just want a snack or lunch, almost in every street you can find a cheap restaurant which offers all kinds of Chinese food.

Art: 798 Art Zone (Cao Chang Di, which is often compared with New York's Greenwich Village or SoHo), The National Centre for the Performing Arts.

Famous Sites: The Great Wall, the Forbidden City (the Palace Museum; palace of emperors during the Ming and Qing Dynasty), Tian An Men Square, Mausoleum of Mao Ze Dong, Temple of Heaven (where emperors made visits for annual ceremonies to pray to Heaven for propsperity and good harvest), the Summer Palace, Siheyuan (courtyard houses) and Hutong (alleys).

Entertainment: Some famous bar street are quite easily reachable by subway. Using Line 10 you can travel to Tuanjiehu and visit Sanlitun (三里屯). This area is famous as an international bar street and offers a lot of different styles of Western food. Another option which is about 25 minutes away is Wudaokao (五道口), this is also a famous area mostly known among students. Yuan Dadu covers an area of 10,000 square meters and provides one of the longest bar streets in Beijing.

Shopping: Xiu Shui Street (Silk Street) is quite a hot spot for foreign visitors where you could buy silk, pearl, Chinaware, handicrafts and clothes at a low price. The other well know shopping areas are Xi Dan and Dong Dan, respectively on the east and west side of the famous Tian An Men Square.

Architecture: This is a city where you could see both traditional architecture of imperial China and much more modern architectural forms.

Climate

Beijing has a monsoon-influenced continental climate. In May it is late spring and the average temperature is among 14–26 °C. Beijing is warm, windy, and dry in this season. Consider to bring lightweight clothing (long-sleeved shirts or T-shirts) plus one or two jackets and coats. Dress warmly when you go out at night. Stay inside if there is dust storm or serious smog and haze. You can use the hourly air quality index for reference.

Bus depends on the local or regional bus. Urban bus price is fixed at ¥1. Segmented fare starts at ¥1 within 12 km, and is incremental at ¥0.5 per 5 km thereafter. Discount is offered for traveling with a general transit card (60% discount) or student transit card (80% discount).

Beihang University

Beihang University (BUAA for short) is "a multi-disciplined, research-oriented university of engineering science and technology with an emphasis on aeronautic and astronautic engineering" (cited from the homepage). It is located in Haidian district is easily reachable by public transport (Subway Line 10). Beihang University has good relationship with local open source communities in Beijing. GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 was held there.

The New Main Building of Beihang University has different sizes of conference rooms. The biggest meeting hall has 270 seats. We also get some discount for the event.

There are different kinds of open source activities here, too. Among them are Software Freedom Day every year, BLUG monthly meetup, PyCon, and so on. As for local Fedora community, we have successfully held FAD in 2011, Release Parties for Fedora release 18--20. We have many cooperatoin with other communities. For example, we held "The unity of open source community (Fedora, Ubuntu and openSUSE)" with BJGUG, Ubuntu community, and openSUSE community together on Mar 19, 2013.

Besides, there are a total of over 80 universities located in Beijing. Some of them have Linux related research team, and a lot of them have Linux or open source related leagues and courses, such as TUNA in Tsinghua, OSLUG in GUCAS, and so on. A lot of students here in Beijing are willing to volunteer for open source related activities.